This is horrifying. Welcome to police state USA folks:
In a stunning break with First Amendment policy on Capitol Hill, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice. Republicans also denied the entrance of a credentialed ABC News news team that was attempting to film the event.
Josh Fox, director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary “Gasland” was taken into custody by Capitol Hill police this morning, along with his crew, after Republicans objected to their presence, according to Democratic sources present at the hearing.
[...]
“Gasland” received strong critical acclaim and takes a critical eye toward the practice of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a process in which several tons of highly pressurized water and chemicals are injected into the ground, allowing valuable natural gas to escape.
[...]
Fox had hoped to film Wednesday’s hearing for a follow-up to “Gasland.”
Fox did not have formal Capitol Hill credentials, but such formalities are rarely enforced against high-profile journalists. … The right to a free press is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Documentary crews are almost never denied access to public meetings of elected government officials.
A separate ABC News crew, which did have official Capitol Hill credentials, was also denied access to the publichearing.
Republicans to all journalists and to America: Fuck the First Amendment. I mean seriously. This was a public hearing being held in the United States Capitol, a building owned by We the People, and the hearing was being conducted by people who We the People elected and who work for us! What the hell is going on around here?
If this isn’t a form of terrorism I don’t know what is.
This is the real cover of the February 6, 2012 issue of Newsweek magazine:
Our presidential campaigns consist of nine second sound bites. Never mind a real discussion of the issues. And instead of being a check and balance on that tragedy, the media encourages it.
Botswana, Namibia, Papua New Guinea and Niger are among the countries that rank higher in press freedoms than the United States in a new index released by Reporters Without Borders:
“Crackdown was the word of the year in 2011. Never has freedom of information been so closely associated with democracy. Never have journalists, through their reporting, vexed the enemies of freedom so much. Never have acts of censorship and physical attacks on journalists seemed so numerous. The equation is simple: the absence or suppression of civil liberties leads necessarily to the suppression of media freedom. Dictatorships fear and ban information, especially when it may undermine them.
[...]
“This year’s index finds the same group of countries at its head, countries such as Finland, Norway and Netherlands that respect basic freedoms. This serves as a reminder that media independence can only be maintained in strong democracies and that democracy needs media freedom.
[...]
Led by President Yoweri Museveni, Uganda (139th) launched an unprecedented crackdown on opposition movements and independent media after the elections in February. Similarly, Chile (80th) fell 47 places because of its many freedom of information violations, committed very often by the security forces during student protests. The United States (47th) also owed its fall of 27 places to the many arrests of journalist covering Occupy Wall Street protests.
You expect to find out if you’re having a boy or a girl, but you might not expect what one local family saw in their sonogram this week. It showed their baby boy “Tebowing” in the womb.
“I think it really hit us kind of when we came home and looked at it because we had just got this on Tuesday; and the weekend before we were all ‘Tebowing,’” Elizabeth Vigil said. She added that the baby is already a part of her Broncos family.
“You’re born into the Broncos when you’re born into my family, pretty cool,” her husband, David Vigil, said.
Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian on CNBC: “Why is it that when Republicans and Democrats need to solve the budget and the deficit, there’s deadlock, but when Hollywood lobbyists pay them $94 million dollars to write legislation, people from both sides of the aisle line up to co-sponsor it?”
I am amazed when I listen to and read coverage of (1) the Republican presidential “debate” on Fox tonight, and (2) news about next Saturday’s primary in South Carolina. This is typical of what’s out there:
If it lives up to the tradition of South Carolina’s down-and-dirty Republican primaries, Monday night’s presidential debate in Myrtle Beach will be a raucous affair.
After all, the Fox News faceoff has all the elements needed for a slugfest. The candidates are tired by this point, and tired of each other. For Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry, South Carolina could be their last stand. They’ve been sharpening their lines of attack against Mitt Romney and now have a chance to deliver them before a national audience.
But they may muzzle themselves, as they did at that ABC debate the Saturday night before the New Hampshire primary. Each of the candidates held back, seemingly waiting for someone else to go first. The result was a flat debate in which Romney emerged largely unscathed. (Perhaps realizing they had whiffed, Romney’s rivals were a bit more aggressive at the next morning’s Meet the Press debate.)
The calculation they must make is this: Voters are often turned off when candidates appear too negative. It’s one thing to let your Super PAC carpet-bomb your opponent; it’s another thing to tackle him with your own bare hands. The danger is that the candidate seems like a hatchet man and obscures his positive message.
But if the also-rans don’t bloody Romney on Monday night—or at the CNN debate in Charleston on Thursday—he’ll likely roll to his third straight victory in the Jan. 21 primary.
Yes, Gingrich, Santorum and Perry have their legacy to defend but there is virtually no contest in that state anymore what with the ballot limited to Romney and Paul and ah, gosh, I don’t think there’s any question whose going to win.
So again, this hype about a horse race in South Carolina is just bullshit.
And why are pollsters including the others in their polling? They aren’t on the dang ballot so what does it matter?
Romney: 32 percent
Gingrich: 21 percent
Paul: 14 percent
Santorum: 13 percent
Huntsman: 6 percent
Perry: 5 percent
Other: 2 percent
Undecided/ No opinion: 7 percent
It’s as if the whole American media empire is gaming us — for ratings.
He’s a former Republican governor of Louisiana and he’s running for the GOP nomination for president. Here is his campaign website.
Anyway, I’ve heard him interviewed several times and one of his (very valid) chief complaints is that he doesn’t have much of a chance in the primaries because media outlets have all kinds of rules as to who they allow to participate in their debates (giving the media waaaaaay too much control over the election process, imho) and he can’t meet them.
But hey, it looks like CNN at least has decided to set those rules aside and to let Rick Perry participate in its next debate on January 19, even though he doesn’t meet their previously-stated criteria either:
CNN now says that Rick Perry is being invited to their debate in South Carolina on January 19, two days before the big primary in which he hopes to make his last stand. This despite the fact that he has not met any of the requirements for participation that CNN made public last week.
“Yes, Gov. Perry will be invited to next week’s CNN debate,” said Edie Emery, director of public relations for Turner Broadcasting Systems, in an e-mail to TPM. “He has met the criteria.”
A follow-up e-mail to Emery, asking which criteria Perry has met, was not immediately returned.
According to CNN’s criteria for inclusion, a candidate must get at least 4th place in either Iowa or New Hampshire, or get 7% support in at least three national Republican or three South Carolina primary polls released in January. The requirements were posted online last Tuesday afternoon, several hours before before the Iowa caucuses began later that night.
Perry came in fifth place in Iowa, and sixth in New Hampshire.
So, if the rules don’t apply to Perry, why do they apply to Roemer? (CNN is letting Perry in because, in the end, they see this as being about entertainment and ratings (not about informing voters) and Perry will help in those areas. You know, if he makes another “Oops” gaffe, it’ll be good for a laugh, but who has ever heard of Buddy Roemer?)
The reserve sheriff’s deputy who captured a man suspected of being the city’s most dangerous arsonist is a volunteer who earns $1 a year and only recently qualified to patrol alone, authorities said Tuesday.
Shervin Lalezary,
a 30-year-old Beverly Hills real estate attorney, was patrolling at 3 a.m. Monday — three hours after the official end of his 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift — when he pulled over a Dodge van in Hollywood.
[...]
“He believes in the community service aspects of the reserve deputy,” Whitmore said. “This is part of the job for him and he doesn’t want to talk about himself because he believes he’s part and parcel of a larger effort.”
Lalezary was born in Tehran and moved with his family to America about 25 years ago.
[...]
“This is one of the most significant arrests anyone can make — regular or reserve,” the sheriff said Monday. “And this will follow him for the rest of his life.”
So, “they” say we should bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran but woohah, they have real people there.
My God. The 24/7 cable “news” coverage of the Iowa caucuses, which has been going on now for roughly a week, is squeezing out everything else that’s happening on the entire planet. It’s hard to believe that so much time is being devoted to something that hasn’t even happened yet, i.e. the results. And to that point, there’s this from David Sirota:
NBC News reporter Jay Gray was arrested last weekend for DUI after a party at the home of Joe Amandola, Jerry Sandusky‘s lawyer, according to TMZ.
Gray is a national reporter for NBC who appears frequently on its affiliated stations. He was one of a group of reporters invited to Amandola’s home for the December 11 Giants-Cowboys matchup, reportedly because the attorney is shopping a Sandusky interview around to the major networks.
Gray has been in State College since November 5 covering the Sandusky story. According to police records obtained by TMZ, Gray was arrested at 1:45 a.m. on December 12 by a Pennsylvania State Police officer.
This isn’t a story about a guy getting arrested for DUI. It’s a story about a “news” reporter, a supposed journalist, kissing up to get a scoop.
Beyond that, “news” reporters who pass themselves off as “journalists” are supposed to be neutral and objective. They shouldn’t have a personal relationship with anyone they cover (they should disclose it if they do) because that might taint or influence what they report. They should “avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information.” They should “always question sources’ motives,” and they should “distinguish between advocacy and news reporting.”
So the crux of this story is what was an NBC “news” reporter doing hanging out with Joe Amandola, essentially kissing up to him so he might be the one Amandola “shops” a Sandusky interview to?
Gee. If Gray had in fact been the one to get that interview, do you think it would have been a fair and objective one? I don’t because Gary would undoubtedly have hoped for another (and another and another) interview and he wouldn’t have wanted to piss Amandola or Sandusky off because, after all, it’s all about him generating ratings for his network.
Ah yes. “New$” circa 2011 in the United States of America.
“Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.”
[...]
The paragraph, one of many that could have been plucked for study and put under the microscope of outrage, is from a story just before Halloween, by Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers, informing us that, while the United States will be pulling troops out of Iraq at the end of the year, the regional war is anything but over: The U.S. military will be massing troops in Kuwait, sending more warships to the region and tightening its military alliance with the six nations that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain), in order to develop “a new security architecture” in the Gulf and establish its “post-Iraq footprint.”
Or in the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region.” And this, she explains, “is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region,” which we care about because it “holds such promise” — oh God, the compassion is killing me — “and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy.”
What’s striking, first of all, is that the “news” is presented to us, under the guise of objective reporting, as a fait accompli: Our supreme leaders have the following plans, the cursory details of which they are nice enough to let us in on.
There is no countertide present in reporting that emanates from the national defense beat — no acknowledgement of a rising national disgust at war or our enormous military failures of the past decade, which the plans the Times story outlines merely continue. There’s no acknowledgment even of obvious contradictions or hypocrisies, such as the fact that our presence in the Gulf arguably constitutes the very “outside interference” from which, according to Mrs. Clinton, the region should be freed.
And certainly there isn’t the least irreverence: no suggestion, for instance, that we have an interest in this oil-rich region beyond a deep love for the people and their democratic aspirations; or that our partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council are autocrats who brutally repress dissent and, ahem, democracy.
The story reads, instead, like interlocking blocks of propaganda dropped into place, not so much disseminating information as protecting the security state planners from questions and challenges. This is the news of empire.
A few years ago I heard someone (Noam Chomsky? Robert Fisk?) say that the gist of foreign policy reporting in the United States is, “The government said. The government said. The government said.” And that’s exactly right.
Tim Pool is a guy I “met” three or four weeks ago when he was walking around with an iPhone filming the goings on in Zuccotti Park and live streaming on UStream. His Twitter address is @TimCast.
He is an incredible reporter. He reported what he saw without adding editorial comment and man oh man, he was a joy to watch. TIME magazine gave him some props in this short video posted on their website.
Anyway, he is movin’ on up. He’s gotten a hold of a drone like thing to film protests from the air. Here is the test run. Note the view from the drone in the upper left hand corner.
This is a horrific story and it occurred under George W. Bush’s watch. You know, when the American flag was ubiquitous and politicians were criticized for not wearing a flag pin on their lapel. When we were continuously reminded how much conservatives respected the troops (as opposed to liberals who allegedly didn’t).
Yeah, that’s right. That’s when this sickening thing happened:
“The Air Force dumped the incinerated partial remains of at least 274 American troops in a Virginia landfill, far more than the military had acknowledged, before halting the secretive practice three years ago, records show.
“The landfill dumping was concealed from families who had authorized the military to dispose of the remains in a dignified and respectful manner, Air Force officials said. There are no plans, they said, to alert those families now.
[...]
The landfill disposals were never formally authorized under military policies or regulations. They also were not disclosed to senior Pentagon officials who conducted a high-level review of cremation policies at the Dover mortuary in 2008, records show.
[...]
“This week, after The Post pressed for information contained in the Dover mortuary’s electronic database, the Air Force produced a tally based on those records. It showed that 976 fragments from 274 military personnel were cremated, incinerated and taken to the landfill between 2004 and 2008.”
On Sept. 17, a couple hundred protesters demonstrating against the excesses of corporate execs and the pervasive influence of high finance in U.S. politics set up camp in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and refused to leave. It was an unlikely occupation, one without leaders, agendas or even a clear sense of goals, but it soon was echoed in myriad cities across the U.S. and the world. To some, Occupy Wall Street is the left-wing iteration of the Tea Party, directing their rage not at big government but at the big banks that gutted the world economy and took billions in bailouts from the U.S. government while awarding themselves hefty bonuses.
I’m actually pretty cynical about this. While I agree with TIME‘s choice, I think this designation is a way for TIME to avoid naming the 99% their “person of the year.”
Less than a month ago TIME posted and opened voting on the nominee. See a screenshot of the list as of November 12 here. The 99% was winning by a landslide.
Oh, and P.S.: I can’t wait to see what happens here. Look at the votes Julian Assange is getting. Can you imagine TIME naming him their Person of the Year? Me neither.
This would be the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank in June, 2009:
This morning, Dana Milbank, Amanda Carpenter, and I appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources, hosted by Howard Kurtz.
It was a spirited affair and folks can draw their own conclusions. Here’s the video.
The only thing that surprised me was when Dana turned to me after our initial sparring and called me a “dick” in a whispered tone (the specific phrase was, I believe, “You’re such a dick”).
Ridiculous, panty-raiding Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank is partaking in further jackassery on behalf of the legendary paper yet again, now making videos where he’s calling Hillary Clinton a “mad bitch.”
Being the arrogant, insulated, inside-the-beltway egomaniac that he is, this would be Dana Milbank today:
I turned the TV on this morning intending to head to my local channel to catch the weather. I don’t know which channel the TV was when I turned it off yesterday but the first shot I saw was an aerial view of a shopping mall in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The anchor was excitedly noting that the parking lot was packed. And yes, there, before my eyes were acres and acres of pavement and parked cars. Woohoo!
Then I began to wonder whether the New York Stock Exchange was going to be open today so I turned to CNBC. They were live inside a mall. It was packed too. Another woohoo!
I finally landed on my local channel for that weather report but it struck me that the media seems happy and relieved that that unfortunately placed, pesky orphan of a holiday — Thanksgiving — is finally out of the way and it can concentrate on the real business of life here in these United States of America – “consumers” (God I hate being called that) buying stuff!
I haven’t watched any “liberal media” today but I’m sure this is the top story and that it’s being repeated every ten or 15 minutes:
A tribunal in Malaysia, spearheaded by that nation’s former Prime Minister, yesterday found George Bush and Tony Blair guilty of “crimes against peace” and other war crimes for their 2003 aggressive attack on Iraq, as well as fabricating pretexts used to justify the attack. The seven-member Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal — which featured an American law professor as one of its chief prosecutors — has no formal enforcement power, but was modeled after a 1967 tribunal in Sweden and Denmark that found the U.S. guilty of a war of aggression in Vietnam, and, even more so, after the U.S.-led Nuremberg Tribunal held after World War II. Just as the U.S. steadfastly ignored the 1967 tribunal on Vietnam, Bush and Blair both ignored the summons sent to them and thus were tried in absentia.
The tribunal ruled that Bush and Blair’s name should be entered in a register of war criminals, urged that they be recognized as such under the Rome Statute, and will also petition the International Criminal Court to proceed with binding charges.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is not wearing well with voters across the country. Only 33% now say that they are supportive of its goals, compared to 45% who say they oppose them. That represents an 11 point shift in the wrong direction for the movement’s support compared to a month ago when 35% of voters said they supported it and 36% were opposed. Most notably independents have gone from supporting Occupy Wall Street’s goals 39/34, to opposing them 34/42.
Voters don’t care for the Tea Party either, with 42% saying they support its goals to 45% opposed. But asked whether they have a higher opinion of the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street movement the Tea Party wins out 43-37, representing a flip from last month when Occupy Wall Street won out 40-37 on that question. Again the movement with independents is notable- from preferring Occupy Wall Street 43-34, to siding with the Tea Party 44-40.
Example: The teaser on my local ABC/Denver channel for tonight’s local news is: “Occupy Denver threatening the safety of people in other parts of the city.” The gist of the report will probably be that the police have to spend sooooooo much time at Occupy Denver, people are oh, I don’t know, dying in other parts of the city.
The big news in the media world today is that NBC has hired Chelsea Clinton:
Photo: Adrian Grenier
Chelsea Clinton is going to work for NBC News.
The network said Monday that it has hired the 31-year-old Clinton to work on projects for the “NBC Nightly News” and Brian Williams’ newsmagazine “Rock Center.” She will do projects in the “Making a Difference” series, generally positive stories about individuals and companies.
The only child of former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has been working primarily as a business consultant.
NBC News already has another daughter of a former president, Jenna Bush Hager, doing work at the “Today” show.
So, if Chelsea has primarily been working “as a business consultant,” what journalist qualifications does she bring to the job? Oh wait. None! She was hired because of who she is. Kinda like Luke Russert, who also works at NBC; and Jenna Bush and Meghan McCain.
I love Glenn Greenwald’s sarcastic but accurate take on this:
I really don’t understand what those angry, lazy losers in the Occupy movement are so upset about. America is a meritocracy; if you work hard and prove your skills, you get ahead. The winners deserve what they have because they have earned it. And when all else fails, we have a media filled with insurgent outsiders who will be relentless watchdogs over those in power because that’s what our media outlets are: true outsiders there to check the most powerful factions.
[...]
Thankfully, the American Founders waged a revolution to free us from the shackles of monarchy so that we’re no longer captive to the inanities of royalty (like those silly Brits). In The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine mocked and scorned aristocracies as producing “counterfeit nobles” — those bestowed with preorgatives [sic] not because of what they’ve achieved but because of the accidental fortune of their birth — and we are thankfully free of those.
I just saw an ad on CNN promoting the next Republican debate — one that will purportedly center on national security — which will be held on Tuesday, November 22.
I think I’m finally catching on to this whole GOP debate thing. The plan seems to be to hold a debate and then talk about it non-stop for days and days until the next debate and then talk about that debate non-stop for days and days until the next debate and on and on. I mean, these uninformative, silly, sound-bite debates are sucking the air out of everything else that’s happening on the planet, as in THE NEWS.
But, then again, when you’ve cut your reporting staff down to near zero, limiting your “news” coverage to chatting about one or two events is cheap and easy. Ah yes, the “liberal media.”
You may have heard that approximately 10,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C. yesterday and formed a human chain around the White House in an effort to convince President Obama to block the Keystone XL pipeline project. Then again, you may not have heard about that because despite the fact that this was a major demonstration, the “liberal media” is blowing it off.
This morning beginning at 7:00 a.m. ET I monitored both CNN and MSNBC — those bastions of the “liberal media” — for 30 minutes to see if they covered this event. Shamefully, neither of them did.
This is what CNN covered during those 30 minutes: The Penn State coaching “crisis;” the transfer of power in Greece; the stability of Italy’s economy; the Conrad Murray trial; back to Penn State; earthquakes in Oklahoma; US stock futures; Bank Transfer Day; Barnes & Noble introducing a new e-reader; Robert De Niro playing Bernie Madoff in a new movie and the introduction of casino gambling in NYC. For a minute there I thought I was watching TMZ.
MSNBC spent the first nine minutes, yes, nine minutes, on Herman Cain, then they moved to the “most qualified” GOP presidential candidate (Newt) and then to the Super Committee.
I know it’s been said many times before, but imagine if 10,000 Tea Partiers formed a human chain and surrounded the White House. It would have been covered live for one, and for two, news of the action would have been the headline every hour (and possibly every half-hour) for at least the following 24 hours.
So shame on the media for not giving this event the importance it deserves and hey, the next time someone whines that the media is “liberal,” particularly CNN and MSNBC, respond with a good ol’ knee-slappin’ belly laugh.
UPDATE: Here’s more. Listen to the wingers and they’ll tell you the Washington Post is part of the “liberal media” too. (I hope you catch the sarcasm about the Tea Party.)
We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove. Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorized in this Report as defamation requests.
That’s it. That’s all they wrote and we don’t know anything more but ah, I’m willing to bet the “local law enforcement agency” Google references is the government of Oakland, California. I mean, when you shoot a veteran in the head who has served two tours in Iraq it doesn’t look all that good. But beyond that, the United States is emulating China, for God’s sake. In China, searches containing the word “Occupy” have been blocked by by the government on a popular search engine called Sina Weibo.
So I’m waiting for wingers to have a fit. You know, because we don’t want to be like those commie “red” Chinese and censor our media do we? Hey? Hey?
Is anyone in a position of power (i.e., a 1%-er) going to denounce this?!
Greg Mitchell over at The Nation is live blogging all things having to do with Occupy Wall Street and he just posted this update:
6:30 At today’s press briefing aboard Air Force 1, not one reporter asked Jay Carney about Oakland, transcript shows. (h/t Sean Quinn). We did get this: ”Jay, do you have a comment on the State Department spending $70,000 on President Obama’s books?” And how did that meeting with Hollywood execs go. Etc.
